Brewing and drinking beer

Ok so a lot has happened sense I last posted. I made the sarsaparilla a few times over with mostly good results. Tried it with maltodextrin for mouthfeel, real vanilla, and a few other tweaks. All of that was in 5 gallon batches. As beer brewing keeps getting put off and 5 gallons of the same soda is a bit much I’m trying soda syrup. I’ll make a few cups or so of syrup and mix it with home carbonated water on a glass by glass basis. My first one is a lavender “lemon” soda. For the procedure I hobbled.together a few different things from around the internet.

Break up the coriander a little bit, not enough to powder it, just break open about 2/3s of the seeds.

Put the water and sugar in a sauce pan and heat. Once the sugar is dissolved add the rest of the ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes. Transfer everything to a French press. Pour the liquid into a heat safe jar, cap and refrigerate.

——————————

Next time:
Only simmer for 10 minutes – the last one came out pretty dark and has an annoying caramel flavor

Reduce the lemongrass: it fills the pot so much I thought I wasn’t going to get more than a few drops out of the batch.

Force carbonating some sarsaparilla soda tonight. The tea I made from the Sarsaparilla and orange peel last night was good so I have high hopes. My recipe:

Roughly 2 tablespoons Sarsaparilla

about a tablespoon of orange peel

a teaspoon of vanilla extract (use whole vanilla bean when available, I don’thave any right now)

1/3 cup sugar

5 cups waer

Bring the water to a boil in a medium sauce pan. Add sarsaparilla and orange peel. Boil for about a minute. Remove heat and cover for 5 minuets or until the tea is cool enough to sample with a spoon. Add the vanilla and sugar. stir to dissolve the sugar. re-cover and allow the tea to cool until it can safely be put in your carbonation vessel. My small batch carbonation system is made from a plastic water filter holder so it has to be pretty cool. Pressurize to 60PSI and shake until the pressure remains mostly constant. Refrigerate, pressurizing periodically. (My carbonation rig won’t fit in the fridge, just the filter part.)

I’ll try a sample when I get home from work tomorrow.

I’m thinking next time I’ll use more sarsaparilla, the non-carbonated version is not as potent as I had thought it would be… we’ll wee how it comes out.

Navigator (the both of us, split even: 75/75): Toasty winter ale. Not what I usually get very enjoyable. (Jackie) Smother that the same in a bottle, without the biscuity taste. I like it better this way(Stacey)

So, the corrected starting gravity of this beer was 1.0515 and the final gravity is, well I don’t know. I started bottling and was about half way through my bottling bucket when I decided to get off the floor and check my terminal gravity, unfortunately I had bottled more than planned and my hydrometer rested on the bottom of the bucket. Estimates on % alcohol content are in the 4-7 range, my personal guess being in the 6 vicinity.

Once bottled it took its sweet time carbonating – at the 2 week mark only a light sparkle was detectable, it took almost a full month to get to full carbonation. After a month of waiting, when we started drinking this batch regularly it matured slowly but very gracefully. Early bottles had strong Belgian yeast tones with an orange floral aroma while in later bottles, the smooth sweet orange flavor overcame the yeast.

When I make this recipe again I may use a different yeast to speed things up a bit and use more of the earthier flavors, angelica root and other spices yet to be determined.

Jackie is making the next batch, currently searching for an IPA receipt, watch here for her progress.

The beer started showing signs of fermentation in 12 hours or so with fairly rapid bubbles through the airlock. About a week and a half in, the airlock had slowed to a crawl and I finally found some new vinyl tubing (my old tube was too dirty to clean) to transfer my beer to my brand new (read: found on the street) secondary fermenter.

While transferring, I found a large portion of the yeast had floated to the top of the primary and smelled awful, but the beer below, flowing into the secondary, smelled amazing, like a mountain of oranges with sugar on top. I did my best to leave the floating yeast cake in the primary.

As I was advised in the brew shop, I topped off my secondary fermenter; it took almost 2 pints of water to limit the exposed surface area. Which it appears may not have been necessary. The transfer to the secondary reawakened enough yeast to overflow my airlock and now, after almost a week in the secondary, the airlock is going every three seconds like clockwork.

As I found the incredible reawakening of my yeast a bit odd I looked it up. Apparently WLP400 (the yeast I used) takes about 3 weeks to reach terminal gravity and many people recommended stirring it regularly which would explain the resurgence after the transfer.

Tastes a lot like molasses (almost a little burnt flavor) but with a much smoother mouth feel, not nearly so thick.

wikipedia tells me

In China, sorghum is fermented and distilled to produce maotai, which is regarded as one of the country’s most famous liquors.

and

Sorghum is in the subfamily Panicoideae and the tribe Andropogoneae (the tribe of big bluestem and sugar cane).

witch I’m guessing is why it was chosen as a fermentable material to replace wheat, barley, rye and oats. Though I wonder if that would make this not beer but maotai. Also I’m gonna say the relation to sugar cane would explain the molasses flavour.

While hops are on the ingredient list they are almost non existent in the flavour profile leaving a very sweet sweet beer.